Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the better part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself,”[15] and in college he was following, without much reflection, the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager when launched on the waters of general literature. It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student. That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There, with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”[16] The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca, Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater English literature.